Ben Bedford is among a group of Springfield residents concerned about ongoing efforts to cut trees back from power lines, which he sees less as trimming and more as mangling.

But the trimming, which City Water, Light and Power commissioned an out-of-state firm to do, aims to cut back on power outages caused by interference with the lines by tree branches.

“Trimmed is a euphemism,” said Bedford, a State Street resident who’s concerned cut-back trees he’s seen on nearby Lawrence Avenue are detracting from the neighborhood’s charm. “They’ve been butchered, really.”

The issue was raised at Tuesday’s Springfield City Council committee of the whole meeting, where Ward 8 Ald. Kris Theilen asked Eric Hobbie, CWLP’s chief utilities engineer, whether the efforts were just removing branches that pose a problem and if crews were taking into account the “integrity” of the trees.

“I’m getting a lot of questions from neighbors where they’re working now,” Theilen said, adding he’s told some of the concerned residents he’s heard from that a lot of power outages stem from tree branch interference with power lines.

CWLP is working with Nelson Tree Service of Dayton, Ohio, whose employees are specially trained to trim around high-voltage power lines, Hobbie said.

Hobbie acknowledged the way branches are cut around power lines is sometimes “unsightly,” but he said historically trees and squirrels pose the most problems when it comes to power outages.

“The No. 1 thing we can do to provide safe and reliable electric service to customers is aggressive tree trimming,” Hobbie said Wednesday. “It’s not always popular.”

The trees are being cut in such a way this year so that it can be done less frequently in the future in hopes of getting on a five-year trimming cycle. Recently, those efforts haven’t been as frequent, and in some of the areas of the city where trimming is going on now, the tree has grown around the entire circuit, Hobbie said.

Bedford earlier this week noticed some of the tree trimming along Lawrence Avenue and didn’t want to see the same thing happen on his street, so he began calling CWLP representatives on Tuesday, he said.

Bedford said he was told workers are making industry-approved cuts, but he’s seen some instances where much of the canopy of branches has been removed.

“Part of the reason we moved into this neighborhood is for its big, beautiful trees,” he said. “No one moves to a city because they haven’t had a power outage in five years.”